Cablegate

Everybody knows that if you torture people you don’t get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.

Anti-Trust

DriveTime is asking the Arizona federal district court to let it do discovery to flush out any Intellectual Ventures ties to Lodsys. DriveTimes says they “strongly suspect, as do others, that Lodsys is a spin-off and the alter ego of a company called Intellectual Ventures (“IV”), known as “patent troll public enemy #1.” … apart from the Intellectual Venture angle, DriveTime makes a reasonable argument that Lodsys has entered the state of Arizona for the purpose of soliciting licensing transactions and, thus, should be subject to Arizona courts. … [and that ] Lodsys will find it difficult to establish that it has any true ties to Texas, given that there is simply a vacant office there in a building complex that appears to cater to such shell companies.

Corporate hacker Aaron Barr draws inspiration from Maxim magazine for his fake persona army. … In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using “fake insider personas” to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets.

From other reports we know group promised to cause conflict and mistrust in the targeted groups.

Kernel Space

Over the past few days there’s been an active discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list surrounding the memory copy (the memcpy function to copy blocks of memory) performance within the kernel. In particular, an application vendor claims to have boosted their application (a video recorder) performance by 12% when implementing an “optimized” memory copy function that takes advantage of SSE3.

This vendor hasn’t yet published the patches to this “optimized” memcpy that’s meant to replace what the developer says is “suboptimal” currently in the Linux kernel, but the patches are being cleaned up and should then be released. Besides a 12.2% boost in the application frame-rate from Atom Z5xx hardware, the C0 residency managed to drop from 75% to 67%, which means lower power consumption too.

To address the question, “what would the world look like without Linux?”, Zemlin started with a blue screen and then a Windows XP boot screen, then a boot screen again, simulating what the world would be like if it still ran only on Windows. He said, “This is gonna be about 20 minutes.”

The second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 kicked off with a key figure to Linux’s success, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Formerly responsible for IBM’s response to emerging technologies, Wladawsky-Berger talked about the disruptive force of Linux then and now, and IBM’s relationship with Linux through the years.

Only in the second of the last two decades have consumers considered Apple a real alternative to a Microsoft-powered PC. That whole time there’s been a third player quietly – at least from the perspective of consumers – building a formidable reputation as the operation system developer to rely on.

Linux has come a long way since the early tinkerings of Torvalds in 1991. The OS has proliferated around the world and into every kind of computer, from smartphones to supercomputers. Here are 11 major milestones in the 20-year history of Linux.

Jay Lyman, senior analyst for the 451 Group, spoke at LinuxCon North America 2011 on the changing Linux landscape. Sessions are short at LinuxCon – about 50 minutes in total, give or take. So there’s not a lot of time to get deep into the nitty gritty and perform a detailed analysis or explanation of a market that’s now nearly 20 years old. Lyman went through a brief discussion of the major players in the market, and touched on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for each.

Games

You are a human being who has waken up in a cryotank… you have no memories, but you find some messages from the past… from yourself…
You don’t feel good… maybe this is a radioactive and toxic place … you may not have much time… You find some stupid robots… with strange answers to your questions.

Our Dead Cyborg Preview article can be read from here. Developed by just one person, Endre Barath has done all the coding, designing and has even written the story. The game seems to be inspired by Amnesia series but is more like a text based, first person hybrid adventure. The controls take a bit of getting used to as there is no mouse control. You can move your character with WSAD and rotate camera by arrow keys. The sound effects and music is good which adds quite an atmospheric feel to the game. Fans of adventure games will have a great time playing this.

Helena the 3rd is coming along nicely, we are 1-2 weeks away from completion now. Although any production has been very slow over the last couple of days due to the birth of my son Liam. If anything, now we are all home and safe this has spurred me on to get this game wrapped up, and I may see him playing Helena in a few years time!

The FlightGear project has announced the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulator. According to the developers, FlightGear 2.4.0 is the result of more than one and a half years of work, and it incorporates a number of new features.

New Releases

Salix LXDE 13.37 has been officially released! This release is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. For everyone that has used our previous LXDE releases there are no surprises here. The application selection has stayed the same for the most part, with all applications being upgraded to newer versions of course. Important changes in this release are the inclusion of Sourcery, our new graphical tool for managing and installing packages from SlackBuilds, which has been developed from scratch for Salix and which is featured in all our 13.37 releases so far and also the replacement of SCIM with IBus as the default input platform for Chinese, Japanese etc. IBus is more modern than SCIM and should work better with all applications. Of course, all relevant system tools have been updated to accommodate this replacement. GTKMan, a simple GUI for viewing manual pages, developed also in-house, has also been added to this release.

Red Hat Family

Yesterday saw the beta launch of Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization version 3.0 offering. The company says that it has worked with industry partners to help establish the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to promote Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an open alternative to proprietary virtualisation solutions

Debian Family

You might not know who Peter is because he’s not very visible on Debian mailing lists. He’s very active however and in particular on IRC. He was an admin of the OFTC IRC network at the time Debian switched from Freenode to OFTC. Nowadays he’s a member of the Debian System Administration team who runs all the debian.org servers.

If you went to a Debconf you probably met him since he’s always looking for new signatures of his GPG key. He owns the best connected key in the PGP web of trust. He also wrote caff a popular GPG key signing tool.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth proudly announced last evening on his blog that the Unity interface introduced in the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release, will be much improved for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

Many new cloud computing platforms–including OpenStack, which is backed by heavy-hitting tech titans–have been beating the war drums for the last couple of years, and VMware’s Cloud Foundry, which is billed to allow deployment and scalability of cloud apps in seconds, is now getting a lot of notice. Right out of the gate, Cloud Foundry experienced some performance hiccups that caused some to question the platform’s stability, but VMware’s platform will get a boost now that Canonical has announced that it will ship client and server components of Cloud Foundry in Ubuntu 11.10–the next major release of Ubuntu.

Canonical is suiting up for the coming microserver wars, confirming that Ubuntu Server 11.10 will run on ARM chips.

Just under three years ago when ARM-based netbooks were taking the PC market by storm and iPad tablets were just a gleam in Steve Job’s eye, Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distro, made ARM processors full peers with x64 processors running its Ubuntu Desktop variant. And now, perhaps at the dawn of an ARM-based server era that will see the x64 architecture get some tough competition for the first time in a decade, Canonical is getting out on the bleeding edge by supporting Ubuntu Server on ARM-based servers.

anonical has announced that October’s Ubuntu 11.10, Oneric Ocelot, will now include VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud environment. Cloud Foundry was launched in April and already supports Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra, Node.js and Scala applications.

Flavours and Variants

But this LXDE edition is supposed to be lightweight but still easy to use, yet I’ve found that it is both harder to use and just as heavy on resources as the main GNOME edition, so I see no reason to recommend it over the main GNOME edition.

The initial boards will go out with a fairly vanilla install of Ubuntu, but in the longer term we intend to provide educational software with a common look and feel. Once we have boards in the field, we’ll be focusing our attention on this.

HP is set to spread the wings of its operating system for its smartphones and TouchPad tablet, webOS, and plant it into a wider technology space of an OS for cars and household appliances. HP’s webOS chief, Stephen DeWitt, who leads the webOS global business unit, is on an HP mission to build up an ecosystem of developers and manufacturers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. DeWitt said HP is looking into webOS embedded into cars and appliances. He said HP was into talks with auto and appliance makers but he did not specify any company names. HP’s webOS has a touchscreen interface and Internet connectivity.

I’ve expressed my views on this extensively in the past, such as when I returned the Motorola XOOM the first time around and pointed at my colleague Scott Raymond’s comparative success with it when rooting the device and installing a special kernel to give him access to his MicroSD card and overclock capability.

We all know Android has these issues because it is a licensed and Open Source platform that is largely experiencing these problems due to fragmentation and loss of control when it gets in the hands of the OEMs/ODMs. And yes, I know that Google has committed itself as of late to try to solve a number of these problems.

But Hewlett-Packard has no such excuses. They fully control the WebOS platform and they control the hardware that it runs on. They’ve got nobody to blame for the TouchPad not performing up to par but themselves.

Phones

Plans are afoot to establish a long-term support system for new versions of the Linux kernel to help slide the penguin into more smartphones.

One of the Linux kernel’s top maintainers has suggested that the Linux community each year picks a version of the kernel that they will commit to maintain for a period of two years, before dropping it for a new kernel.

Such a long-term support commitment would mean that the chosen version of the kernel receives big fixes, security and hardware updates from maintainers.

Android

You don’t always get what you expect when you push a button on your Android smartphone. In fact, if you know all the right moves, you can get a lot more. Android uses a combination of touches, drags, double-touches, stabs, flicks and pinches to control what you see on your display. For example, a button can be briefly touched to initiate one response, but it can also be touched and held to initiate a different response.

Google and MIT have worked together on multiple projects in the past, and each collaborative project has given a good idea of Google’s mid- to long-term priorities. Their most recent investment is in the “MIT Center for Mobile Learning,” which is researching ways to ”transform learning and education through innovation in mobile computing.” Google Android will be the starting point for much of this innovation.

Audioboo, voice recording app, was once a darling of the app world. It has gone a little more quiet of late, as a rush of other apps, such as Sound Cloud, have also entered the space. Now, it is taking the Android version of its app open source, as it prepares to launch a premium, paid version of its app for the iOS public. Mark Rock, Audioboo’s founder and CEO, told paidContent that the decision to make its Android app was not a light one, but that it was a necessary step in managing the app for a company that only has five full-time employees.

This week, The Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux – giving many observers the opportunity to consider whether it’s achieved much traction beyond heavy, iron-based server solutions or niche technologies. Pardon the cliche, but those questions miss the forest for the trees.

Linux revolutionized the concept of sharing and collaborating on technology through the open-source model, a model that not only holds up 20 years later but is accelerating. With Google open-sourcing Android, NASA and RackSpace open-sourcing OpenStack, Oracle continuing to open-source MySQL, the list goes on and on with critical contributions of “community” to all aspects of consumer and enterprise technology.

Events

I had the good fortune of being present for Jono Bacon’s excellent community session at OSCON a few weeks ago. (The 40 minute version, not the 15 minute keynote version with which he was wholly dissatisfied.) As the open source model matures, community management as a discipline is maturing with it, and Jono did an excellent job of bringing together some of his own best practices in a concise and useful presentation. He promised to have his deck uploaded soon, so as soon as he does, I’ll link to it. (Jono: hint hint.)

Hello again folks. I’ve been very busy over the last 2 weeks. Not least with a little thing called OggCamp11. So in lieu of my normal Weekly Rewind I’ve decided to write about events since last Friday Aug 12th. There’s probably enough in there to make a novel on its own. If you’re reading this blog for the first time you might like to know that OggCamp is a 2 day event bringing together Open Source / Free Software fans and Free Culture peeps, along with Makers, Artists, Musicians and anyone else we can grab. I’m one of the organisers and this year it was held in Farnham, Surrey. So, if you’re all sitting comfortably I’ll begin…

Web Browsers

Once upon a time God gathered all the animals in one place and commanded: clever ones should go to the left, beautiful ones should go to the right. All the animals made their choice. And only a monkey stayed in the middle. She could not tear herself into 2 parts.

For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain – mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless – there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs; this was pano­ramic looting.

Following days of rioting in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed looking at “whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality” and noted that he had “asked the police if they need any other new powers”, going on to suggest that Twitter, Facebook, and BlackBerry ought to consider removing messages that might spur further unrest in the country.

Cablegate

Finance

Earlier this month, events resulting from genuine grievances were collectively painted only as vandalism and looting, even though that is a gross generalisation – an oversimplification to be exploited by opportunistic politicians . The real issues were left buried under the rug and a mesmerising picture of buildings/buses on fire was implanted in people’s minds in order to make oppressive new legal instruments seem acceptable and even necessary.

Summary: Microsoft starts a campaign of lies against Google because Google exposes Microsoft’s serious antitrust violations just when an antitrust official in the CPTN/Novell case becomes antitrust chief

MICROSOFT wants to have it both ways with CPTN, a collective of Novell’s patents. On the one hand Microsoft wants to intimidate Google (threats of legal action) and on the other hand it wants to use CPTN to characterise Google as an “evil” patent hoarder. Microsoft’s chief liar from Waggener Edstrom is responsible for this utterly shameless PR strategy, which was supposed to distract people from the real news about Microsoft conspiring with Apple to attack Google’s Android (Linux). This is not the first time that we see such strategic decoy. We saw that some days ago when Motorola and Google had an announcement to make and also when Microsoft got caught in a major scandal, plagiarising Google results by tracking users. Microsoft tried to deflect by painting Google — not itself — as the villain in this story.

Being a disgusting, despicable liar is not a crime; it’s Microsoft’s modus operadi.

When Microsoft asked Google to take part in a bid for Novell’s patents, it wanted to block the Internet-search giant from gaining protection against the other bidding partners, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said today.

“Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them,” Drummond said this afternoon on Google’s blog, updating a posting he wrote yesterday. “We didn’t fall for it.”

Microsoft are such disgusting liars. In order to get some media attention (they can pull the right strings), they pretend to have made a ‘leak’ available, rather than issue something electronically. Putting aside confidentiality violations (Microsoft doesn’t give a damn about the law or about ethics), what it shows is far from evidence of crime. If anything, perhaps Google should respond by making a new searchable site for Comes vs Microsoft, full with evidence of Microsoft’s aggression and its crime lasting decades. This includes evidence of an attack on charities because these may help Google.

Pozen came to the Antitrust Division in February 2009 as chief of staff and counsel. She was the lead antitrust official in the CPTN/Novell case, which involved a group of tech firms including Microsoft and Apple being forced to license old Novell patents to the open-source community.

Maybe there is hope that this official will also see how Microsoft is distorting the CPTN saga in order to daeminise Google and meanwhile hide its own serious antitrust violations.

“Stephen Elop who came from Microsoft to take control of Nokia has done little to help Nokia, but everything to help Microrosft,” writes Muktware. “Interestingly the guinea pig Nokia phone N9 running Nokia’s own OS MeeGo, which was hugely appreciated did not impress Elop. He flatly said that even if N9 does well the company will not change the course from becoming the delivery truck for Microsoft.”

Further down it says: “According to my observation the message ex-president of Microsoft’s Business Division, now in charge of Nokia, seems to be giving is:

* Nokia’s shutdown of MeeGo is OK
* Microsoft’s repeated attack on Android players it OK
* Spreading FUD via proxies (Edward J. Naughton, Florian Mueller) is OK
* But if Google acquires Motorola to protect itself from the attacks of Microsoft that is not OK.

“Whenever I read comments from Stephen Elop, the ex-president of Microsoft’s Business Division now in charge of Nokia to make it a hardware delivery truck for Microsoft, I struggle to figure out myself, why this comment seems to be coming from Microsoft!”

Microsoft is like a cancer that attaches itself to companies and the antitrust regulators are simply not doing their job. Moreover, Microsoft is lying like truth is a sin and nobody in the corporate press calls them out on it. █

The extension of the deal does not come as a surprise given that Microsoft has recently shown more than a passing interest in improving the experience of customers using Windows systems to run Linux on its Hyper-V emulation layer.

Microsoft personnel recently submitted changes to patches for making Hyper-V work better with the Linux kernel; the original patches did not meet the strict quality standards of the kernel maintainers and hence had been left out of the kernel.

The renewal of the deal will not occasion even half the hysteria that the original deal did; Microsoft, at that time, was considered an active competitor on the world stage. That is no longer the case, with the Vista debacle having sucked most of the oxygen out of the company’s lungs.

And SUSE has not proved to be the force that Microsoft thought it would be – Red Hat is still the enterprise Linux leader by a huge margin, and its growth shows no sign of abating.

A FEW weeks ago when we mentioned a statement from Novell we missed an important part of it which said that Vibe (formerly known as “Pulse”) had been buried for “focus” (nice spin). The truth is something like this:

Novell has decided to shut down its Web-hosted Vibe Cloud enterprise social collaboration suite, which bombed with customers although the market is hot for competing products.

It “bombed with customers,” eh? It’s a good thing that not many companies fell into this trap then. After all, Pulse/Vibe was proprietary, unlike Wave and more like SAP. Rik Myslewski writes:

After floating it around the market for only three months, Novell has decided to evaporate its Vibe Cloud web-based “social collaboration platform for the enterprise”.

The decision to decommission the Vibe Cloud service as of September 30 was announced by Novell’s new president and GM Bob Flynn in a Thursday post on the company blog, optimistically entitled “Defining the Next Chapter of Novell: Focus and Commitment”.

SOME WEEKS ago it was reported that NSW Health had abandoned Novell’s GroupWise, following a trend we have been covering many times this year (with examples). Here are the details about the latest anecdote:

NSW Health has started preparing the consolidation of all its disparate email systems into one Microsoft Exchange environment for some 200,000 end-users across the state government department with the big loser being Novell’s GroupWise.

Summary: Gates-funded lobbyists are trying to privatise a $500 billion-per-year system (funded by US taxpayers) and teachers are unable to stop this

THIS Web site has covered this topic many times before, but the problems remain and nobody is able to do anything to stop it. The press is paralysed (bribed by the Gates Foundation) while Seattle’s teachers are keeping track of Gates monopolisation of their industry, which is a special industry because it is funded by the public (half a trillion dollars per year). Where is the Seattle Times? Counting Gates' cash?

The Gates Foundation is issuing some education-flavoured PR once in a while to create the public perception that it is helping and thereby daemonise all critics of the hidden agenda which goes on behind closed doors. It’s an easy job to do when one is buying the press, even some blogs. In any event, as we continue our catchup with the Gates Foundation’s malice we come across the following (excepts):

Sara Morris, the CEO of the Alliance for Education, was there and spoke. The Alliance works hand in glove with the district to push its agenda and helps channel (some might argue, launder) private funding to the district with major strings attached. I found it interesting that Morris didn’t mention her important role in the school district, but instead coyly only identified herself as ‘a mother of three kids in SPS.’ She went into detail extolling the virtues of the Strategic Plan, including the resource-draining MAP test. Of course she knew all the details of the plan very well – her organization wrote the $6 million grant proposal request to the Gates Foundation to fund the Strategic Plan.

[...]

Morris’ organization also snuck D.C .political operation, the “National Council on Teaching Quality,” into town in 2009 and paid them $14,000 (with Gates money) to write a preconceived critical “Human Capital report” on our district’s 3,000 teachers. This was then used by the corporate reformers to try to intimidate the teacher’s union into accepting merit pay in their new contract. For Sara Morris to pretend she was merely a mother of three kids in Seattle schools was disingenuous to say the least.

The Broad backed, Gates funded League of Education Voters is at it again with another one of their spam e-mails. So far they have backed both bills that propose to determine teacher layoff’s by student performance, basically test scores, and permanently fire teachers if there is a school closing, Senate Bill 5399 and House Bill 1609. They desperately want folks, under the guise that it’s all about the children and not their salaries, to call their representatives in support of Bill 5399.

[...]

What is of particular interest to me is that his wife, Bree Dusseault, was recently hired by our superintendent as an Instructional Director. This is a new set of positions that was recently created by our superintendent. Ms. Dusseault’s background includes work at the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) which is funded by Gates, the Waltons and the Seattle Foundation. The CRPE is dong a research study for Gates now on charter schools. Hmmm, I wonder how that study will turn out.

Who is able to stop these people? The super-rich people still control society and they use the education system to prepare kids to think in a compatible fashion. █

Summary: Even the Seattle Times, just like a lot of for-profit publications, is being paid by Bill Gates while publicly worshipping him

“The Seattle Times received a $15,000 Gates grant through Seattle University for a series of stories on homelessness in 2010,” said an article we mentioned early in the year. The source of this article is the Seattle Times itself. Moreover, says a critic/watcher of the Gates Foundation:

Read the original article to see the graphics and sidebars, including one about Gates Foundation funding of the Seattle Times.

The “Gates Foundation controls media through massive journalism grants” is one of the many headlines resulting from her piece that she wrote while still at the Seattle Times. It is a serious issue that nobody should ignore. We have seen many such examples before. Gates funds public television and radio channels, even the BBC, which is already paid for by British taxpayers. If he polices the press, then he can do almost anything he wish while portraying those who offer dissenting opinions as ‘out of line’ wrt the press he buys and controls. █